We currently choosing platform for RIA App. I looks at number of possibilities and so far.
Best UI I've seen so far was done on Silverlight. ASP.NET is more common but it's not as dynamic. So here is my question:
Is Silverlight sufficient platform for RIA App ?
A year ago I started a job where I took over development of a Silverlight RIA app. We have since ported the app over to ASP.NET MVC and we are much happier overall. I wrote a blog post that goes over our reasons for switching here
Silverlight is great technology that is truly capable of some amazing stuff. However, in my humble little opinion, it's not quite the ideal platform for a rich web oriented application. HTML/CSS/JS still rule the day if you ask me.
Netflix uses Silverlight for playing movies instead of Flash probably because of .NET. It has a smaller market share but a lot of the demos seem to be very professional.
Why not javascript and HTML?
Related
I know there are other issues involved in any decission when beginning a large project, but my experience in the past has been with SL web based apps (w/ entity framework) where I have found wcf ria services such a time saver, I am wondering what people think about the reasons one might remain with wpf for desktop apps where so much more effort must be expended to match what the ria services provide in SL. This project is definitely a data-centric business app.
Any and all oversvations and experiences would be most welcome.
Thanks,
Steve
I may have some insight on your situation, since I am faced with making the same decision right now. I wrote up a blog post about my experience here:
http://samuelmueller.com/2010/11/wpf-4-vs-silverlight-4-which-do-you-choose
To summarize, WPF has one very big advantage over silverlight, especially with data-centric apps:
Performance.
With that being said, the list of negatives is quite daunting, and really makes WPF a hard sell over Silverlight:
No support for WCF RIA Services, even with SP1
Sub-par validation support, with INofityDataErrorInfo missing
The WPF toolkit has been practically abandoned, whilst Silverlight toolkit and theming are very much active.
No Fluid UI
If you can live with the performance, it seems like Silverlight is the more productive and compelling choice, at least until MS makes some effort into leveling the two platforms.
The thing is, Microsoft seemed to have developped WPF at the beginning, but failed to really keep it fresh. On the other hand, they are working on improving Silverlight, releasing new version almost every years.
I still like WPF over typical windows forms and find that not having RIA services isn't much of a problem since you can still access databases the way I am used in normal Windows Form.
After 9 month developing an enterprise application using MVC + JQuery our Management and stockholders interesting to convert and switch to silverlight! they think it's more powerful than Ajax, make development speed faster than our current solution, It's Windows and Web and less headache.
Unfortunately, our stockholders dos not know anything about web and stateless state of web application and they always compare with window applications.
But nobody in our team know anything about silverlight. I am not sure that is a good decision. I think we develop as fast as possible. we develop a great framework and code generator for fast develop.
Thanks and sorry for bad English.
Dumping what you have and going for a rebuild mid development is almost always a bad idea.
For a personal project, I did exactly this. It was originally built during the betas of asp.net MVC. I got the app to a stage where it was usable (actually I still use it daily), but it was nowhere near ready for the outside world. And this was the problem; it was going to take an enormous amount of work so that other people could use it...
When Silverlight 3 was announced, I literally grabbed the backend of the app - stuck RIA services in between and had a few screens up and running that day without any prior SL knowledge. I probably could have kept going down this path but something clicked when I started to realise the power of silverlight. The goal posts for my app moved, and I began a SL specific rewrite.
Since then, I've started re-writing about 5 times over. I guess I'm still just learning how to best build an app in SL, having spent the last 12 years or so of my career working on stateless web apps, there was a big mental shift involved.
I'm a much better web developer then I am a silverlight developer, but if it was for a real project (rather then a pet side project) - it would have been shipped and out the door by now.
I'm convinced that SL is the ideal platform for most web applications (as long as it being a plugin isn't going to be any issue).
With that said, shipping is still the most important thing. SL is great, but the learning curve is steep. If you guys are anywhere near completing the app, I'd insist you forge on with mvc and maybe get someone to build a SL branch.
Re-platform an application is always costly, although if you've got your MVC right it should theoretically be easier to replace the "VIEW" part of the application with something else.
As to whether Silverlight offers you more than HTML / JavaScript is down to what you're using it for. If what you are doing is media-related or highly graphical, Silverlight might be a good choice. If your application is like most business apps (i.e. some input fields backed by some read / write to database) Silverlight doesn't really offer any tangible time saving for this kind of operation.
If the web application is public and you care about search engine indexing, semantic HTML offers the best possible option.
Currently as my job profile i am more working on asp .net application but i also wanted to have my hands on silverlight application. so, i just decided to build one silverlight 4 application in my spare time and on weekends.
We are having a team of around 4 people. We also tried for commercial application but as we can only develop it in our available time we can not commit on timeline as well as we people are new to SL, so first we need to learn concept and implement it. (Though we know the concept of binding, commanding,templates etc.)
Now i just thought to work on project like creating a social networking site in SL 4
having facilities like forum, blogs, calander, task, dashboard etc.
We want to use features like .Net RIA Service, Entity Framework, MVVM pattern, SL 4.
Objective here is to learn new concepts as well as to get some good project experince in silverlight.
Now,
what you people suggest is it a good idea ?
If yes then the project selected is correct or you suggest some other project ?
Any pattern or technology related suggestions ?
This is quite a vague set of questions but I'll attempt to give my 2 pennies worth of advice.
As a learning project this is as good an idea as any to get going with. As a commercial idea it probably isn't such a good one due to there not being any niche in your product. It has all already been done, and been done successfully by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Developing any kind of social media site is incredibly difficult as the market is already fairly saturated. As I said though, as a learning project it's quite nice as you can just borrow concepts and ideas from other sites and you can concentrate on you main goals of gaining knowledge in the various technologies.
Whatever you decide to do I'd say split the project up into much smaller components rather than having the end goal in sight. Try to take more of an agile approach by setting yourself 2-3 week targets. It should help keep the momentum going. My experience is that learning projects tend to die a death as people get bored of the concept and lose motivation to do it. By keeping the tasks small you get to see small results often. This should help keep you motivated as you move from requirement to requirement.
Personally I think setting up personal projects and goals like this are a great way of learning new technologies - good for you!! :-)
From a tooling perspective it sounds like SL4 is an ideal route to follow. This is highly likely to be released in early 2010 and has some awesome new features compared to SL3. Would also recommend using VS2010 and WCF RIA Service too.
From a code sharing POV have you considered hosting your project on Codeplex? This will give you a hosted TFS server to manage your source code in a distributed way. This is bound to save you some big bucks.
As far as document management is concerned Google Docs are certainly worth a look (as is Google Sites as a really easy to set up (albeit simple) project management portal).
Finally, I can't recommend learning SketchFlow highly enough. As a prototyping tool for silverlight it is really, really cool. Take a look at the PDC video for a great kick start on this.
Good luck :-)
I'm looking at Silverlight architectures and RIA Services looks interesting, but I am a bit concerned about its prelease status and how the feature set will change.
We need our client app to be as responsive as possible over a slow network link, so a high priority is a solid sync system for pushing model state changes from the client back to the server. Will RIA Services help us in this regard or will I have to roll my own logic to do this ? Are there any other frameworks that can assist with this? Is the feature set involved in these requirements liable to change much in the next couple of months?
If it makes any difference, our frontend is 100% Silverlight, so we dont need to worry about exposing SOAP APIs from the server or anything like that. It appears to me that RIA so far is a bit more mature for Silverlight use. Is this correct?
I am using SL 3, .NET RIA and EF. Still trying to figure out how to load, and update data effectively and best in performance. Little information that I have so far how to improve the performance issue that I face. Still need more time to get these frameworks to be mature. Hopefully, there are more resources and insight in the near future.
My take is if you are handling very light data application, silverlight can be a good choice. Once you have loaded the application in to your machine, it is like loading application within your box.
I would look into some of the ORM's / IoC Frameworks which help create a separation of interests. A couple examples are Castle Windsor IoC, they have a sample Silverlight 4 application that utilizes the Castle Windsor Framework. Another common ORM for Silverlight is
BL Toolkit. These have been around for a while in the Java arena but are newer in the .NET area. They basically help to move the complexities of the relational data model out of the UI code and delegate it to the Framework.
I've been asked to do some work on an existing Silverlight project, mainly extending it a bit and doing bug fixes as needed. But there are a couple of ASP.Net pages too and a WCF service to deal with too. My background is desktop development with .Net so I think this is a good opportunity to start getting more involved in Web development.
So I'm trying to figure out what background knowledge I need for a project like this. Clearly I need to get familiar with Silverlight, but I'm not sure what other Web technologies, etc I need to ramp up on for this project. Obviously I would like to know as much as possible but in reality with limited time and resources I really need to focus on what I important in the near term for this project. Then expand my knowledge as things arise.
The things I'm thinking that are important in the immediate future are:
The basics of Web Development (I'm thinking this might be the most important\fundamental area to build a good foundation)
But what are consided the basics?
What is technology\language independent?
What is important for Silverlight?
The basics of ASP.Net (since there is some ASP.Net code)
What are the basics? ASP.net seems so huge, I have a 1000+ pg book here which seems daunting.
If you focus on Silverlight is knowing ASP.Net important, or is ASP.Net something I will continually run into?
How does ASP.Net MVC fit into the overall development picture and especially as related to Silverlight?
The basics of WCF
As compared what?
Any suggestions\comments on the list above?
What other topics\technologies will I run into if I continue doing Web development?
Note: Beyond this project I would focus on the Microsoft stack.
Generally speaking the amount of knowledge of ASP.Net you need to do Silverlight development is very very low.
Silverlight applications are hosted in a browser, usually via the <object> tag. This can sit on an asp.net page or a html page. The Silverlight template creates that for you, so you can forget its there and just get on with the Silverlight app.
Of course if you are integrating into an ASP.net environment (for example, islands of Silverlight sprinkled through an ASP.net site) then thats another thing. There are ways to get Silverlight talking to the HTML dom via the HTML Bridge but its not necessary. Really depends on what you are developing and integrating with. (new site vs existing)
I avoided ASP.net for as much as i could as the richness compared to desktop (WPF) just wasnt there. Silverlight changed all that. Its a Rich world on the web now!
Best place to start learning Silverlight is www.silverlight.net on the getting started part of the site. great Quickstarts and tutorials there.
Good luck
Only cursory knowledge of traditional web technologies (css, html, js, etc.) are necessary for silverlight development. As a consequence, you also don't need to understand the many cross-browser dependencies as well.
Here is my list of things that you must get a really good understanding of to be proficient at Silverlight development:
Understanding WCF (the Silverlight-supported parts) is essential. It can be a configration nightmare, but once working it is pretty stable/ reliable
You need to understand serialization used by WCF and how to debug the mysterious 404 errors. Get good at Fiddler and/or Firebug.
You must understand multi-threaded applications and how do debug them. Silverlight makes extensive use of threading to not block the UI thread. This creates numerous opportunities for race conditions that create what appear to be "magical" results. That said, it is incredibly powerful and IMHO one of the dominant reasons to use Silverlight.
What you learn about serialization and WCF will ultimately help you cache some data in IsolatedStorage. Learn about IsoStorage, it will reduce our bandwidth requirements and cost and improve your user experience
Learn about Linq - again this is one of the most powerful features of Silverlight. Combined with a smart client-side caching strategy you can offload lots of processing to the client.
Figure out how you going to support printing. SL3 does not at all and you will need a server side component. SL4 beta does, but it is not go live
Understand the Silverlight Roadmap as much as possible and plan out your roadmap to match/ sync with it as best as possible. I first built a SL2 app and I spent a lot of time building things by hand that were ultimately released in SL3. As it is getting more mature, there is less of this.
Download the Silverlight Toolkit and use it. But more importantly examine the source code, the structures, its build process. There is not better real world place to look for inspiration & best practices.
Good luck.